Dude.
Chill, will ya?
You’ve been cat napping,
as you do,
pretty much all day,
rising now and then
to stretchhhhhhh
and scratch a little.

You are a study in repose,
belly up, somehow balancing
on your keel of a spine,
bow to the sky,
stern splayed,
well, to the sky, too.
a vessel ready
to launch.

Let your sleeping cat-self lie,
float your pea-green boat,
dream pussycat dreams,
then return and tell me
what you saw—

perhaps an owl with whom
you paddled away
for a year and a day,
then, hand in hand,
on the edge of the sand,
you danced by the light
of the moon.

•••

Lines in the last stanza borrowed from “The Owl and the Pussy-cat”
(1871) by Edward Lear.